Music is very important to me. It is my healer, my inspiration and often, helps me get to places I otherwise wouldn’t. I write to music and with music. I work with music too. Music makes my soul soar to the heavens and back again. It also triggers memories as well as feelings and inspiration. Just a couple of bars of a song and I can be transported across decades. There are songs from the 1960’s and late 50’s that instantly put me in a small front room in the house I was born in. I can see the valve radio sitting on a shelf with its complex mapping of wavelengths and stations across the front of it. I can see the large box-like TV with essentially curtains that could

Thinking about the haunted jacket incident has brought back a few other memories and, in the run up to Halloween, I think I will develop a theme of ghostly experiences over the coming days. In that vein, here is today’s true scary story. It was the summer of 1981. Bryan Adams was playing on the radio, the sun was shining and I was driving a brand new Ford Mustang. I was in Nova Scotia, Canada where I was doing my first season of fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis. Things could not be better. I had applied for a couple of Ph.D. programs earlier that summer. The one at Strathclyde University in conjunction with the British Geological Survey in Leeds was the one I wanted for all sorts of reasons. Firstly,

I really have a terrible memory. I cannot remember the details of what I was doing last week never mind last year and I am often surprised to be told what I had done at some particular event that I have no recollection of whatsoever. For example, I came across some old computer files yesterday – hockey statistics for my eldest son from a decade ago. It made interesting reading especially the four games played in a tournament in St. Louis. I could swear I had never been there and yet there was suddenly a glimmer of a memory and boom – I remembered the arch there and it all came flooding back. To my defense, ice hockey rinks all look the same after a while and much of the